By
any standards, the 4th Ministerial conference of the WTO was an
extraordinarily successful meeting. We tend to talk rather glibly
about the historic importance of such events, but this time, for once,
the claim is not exaggerated; the meeting at Doha will be remembered
as a turning-point in the history of the WTO and the trading system
and in relations between developed and developing countries within
that system.

Before
I talk about where we go from Doha, I think it is worthwhile to
reflect on the value of the multilateral trading system, indeed what
mankind has done over the past 50 years to advance the human
condition. I do this because “alarmists” have painted a picture of
a world gone backwards over the past fifty years and I think the
opposite.

The
capacity of the human species to learn, adapt and improve marks us out
as different to other species. This observation may seem a little
hollow given a new type of war being fought on every front against
terrorism when so many people are asking; why war? Will we ever learn?
Yes, we have learnt, that's why the war. We make mistakes but we
correct them.

That's
why the Marshall Plan, the mirror opposite of the vicious Versailles
Treaty, was implemented — the first case in history when the victors
refinanced the vanquished. The great depression was made more lethal
and deeper by protectionism which helped produce a second world war
and gave life to the twin tyrannies of last century, fascism and
Marxism, both of which have been destroyed and discredited. We
suffered and learnt. That's why the GATT/WTO was created to build
stable open trading rules, the UN and its agencies to promote
political peace and to alleviate the problems and poverty that allow
political hate to fester. Imperfect mechanisms, but the world would be
a more dangerous place without them.

More
has been done to reduce poverty in the past 50 years than the previous
500 years, yet many protest 'not enough' and have created a myth about
globalization. Globalization is not new, historians argue we had about
the same level of trade 100 years ago as today. Certainly more people
were on the move then than now. We should not reject criticism and
scrutiny, nor should we be smug.

It's
this never ending debate that drives us to improve.

In
a century, Illiteracy has fallen from 75 per cent to below 20 per
cent in developing countries. In 1960 most people in developing
countries spent only a third as long in school as people in
industrialized countries, now it's half as long.

In
1900 people lived for 30 years on average, now they live on
average 67 years. In 1950 life expectancy in the developing world
reached 41, in 1998 it was 65. From being expected to die by age
24 in 1930, China has increased life expectancy to 70, a
three-fold increase in two generations. In 1950, 18 per cent or
almost every fifth child died in the developing world, in 1995, 6
per cent. In 1950 almost 6 per cent of all new-borns did not
survive, now 1 per cent. Developing countries have the same infant
mortality rate as the industrialized countries in 1950.

The
share of people in developing countries with access to clean water
has increased 30 per cent in 1970 to 80 per cent in 2000. Over 30
years the share of people with access to sanitation has more than
doubled.

Despite
the doubling of the US GNP over the past 30 years, they are using
less steel. US population is up by a third but vehicle emissions
have dropped by a third. Over the next ten years despite traffic
increases, emissions will decrease by 20 per cent in the US and 30
per cent in the UK. The last 15-20 years has seen lead
concentration levels fall by over 90 per cent. EU emissions have
been cut by 60 per cent since 1984.

In
1992, more than 21 per cent of European beaches were polluted, by
1999 only 5 per cent were polluted. When measured naturally
through fish in the US or through herring gull eggs in the great
lakes, pollutant concentrations have declined by 80-90 per cent.

London
is cleaner than it has been for a 100 years and pollution is New
Delhi and Beijing is about where London was 50 years ago.

Remember
the headlines about acid rain and the number of species that face
extinction? Acid rain in the end affected 0.5 per cent of European
forests,

Thirty
years ago workers in Chinese Taipei earned USD 7.50 a month, now its USD
7.50 per hour.

Open
societies, open economies do better. Development means security, means
peace, means higher living standards and better outcomes in terms of
the human condition and human rights improve. That’s why I wanted
this job.

But
now let's consider what was achieved at Doha. The accession of China
and Chiese Taipei to the organization. The agreement on a massive
programme of work and negotiations will set the content and direction
of work in the WTO for years to come. This programme responds to the
enormous changes in the Membership of the Organization. Ministers have
deliberately set themselves a very demanding target in agreeing a
three-year deadline for this huge work programme. But it can be done.

I
have no doubt that to a large extent we owe the success in Doha to the
political sense, and sense of responsibility, of the Ministers who
attended. Raising a technical debate to the political level does not
always produce the wider vision we hope for, but this time it
certainly did. There was a conscious response to the need for
solidarity in the face of dangerous economic and political
uncertainty. For me, one of the most heartening aspects of the process
was the readiness of Ministers to recognize and accommodate the needs
of their colleagues, and to make concessions to achieve consensus. The
agreement to negotiate on tariff peaks and high tariffs is one example
of this. Another is the decision to negotiate on anti-dumping
disciplines, which has long been a very sensitive issue and which was
a major obstacle to agreement in Seattle.

The
outcome at Doha brings to an end the uncertainty, loss of momentum and
lack of confidence created by the equally spectacular failure at
Seattle two years earlier. As Bob Zoellick said in the final plenary
meeting “we have removed the stain of Seattle”. The issues facing
Ministers were essentially the same as those they failed to resolve at
Seattle. A second failure would have fatally weakened the
Organization: the question would have been posed, inescapably, whether
it had become impossible, given our greatly expanded Membership and
the huge disparities between Members, to move the work of the
Organization forward through our mechanism of consensus decisions.

We
learned some hard lessons in Seattle, and were resolved not to repeat
them in preparing for Doha. As a result the consultations which
produced the draft texts sent to Ministers were undoubtedly the most
transparent and inclusive that we have ever seen, as was the process
in Doha. There is no doubt that improved working methods contributed
enormously to the spirit of the meeting and to the outcome.

If
I can now turn to the substance of the work programme agreed at Doha;

First,
it invigorates and extends the negotiations for liberalizing access to
markets which are the core business of the WTO. The negotiations on
agriculture and services will move into a higher gear. There are big
gains to be made in both of these areas; in services, for example the
World Bank has estimated that welfare gains from a 50% cut in services
sector protection would be five times larger than for non-services
sector trade liberalisation. The agreement to work towards the phasing
out of export subsidies in agriculture was vital to the agreement at
Doha and is critically important for the future of agricultural trade.
Everybody has recognized for years that these subsidy policies are
unsustainable — in OECD countries subsidies are running at close to
$1 billion a day. Abolishing these subsidies would be worth three
times all the ODA and eight times all the debt relief extended so far.
Subsidies are unfair to the consumers who pay for them and damaging to
countries who cannot compete with them. Now we have a real prospect of
doing something about it.

In
addition, Ministers agreed to negotiations on market access, covering
both tariffs and non-tariff barriers, for industrial products. The
mandate is comprehensive, specifically covering peak tariffs and
tariff escalation, which are key objectives for developing countries,
as well as high tariffs. It is estimated about two-thirds of the
benefits of further reductions in industrial tariffs will go to
developing countries, whose share in exports of manufactures has risen
dramatically in recent years.

Cutting
barriers to trade would be like adding two more Chinas to the world
economy. Three quarters of all the benefits from cutting industrial
tariffs would go to developing countries. Each year developing
countries command a larger and larger share of the industrialized
world's imports, from 15 per cent in 1990 to almost 25 percent in
2000. Half of Japan's manufactured imports come from developing
countries. For the US, the figure is 45 per cent and rising.

There
is enough in the Doha package for everyone. Trade is not the only
development factor, but it is an important motor for growth. Other
issues such as good governance, debt relief, technology and investment
matter.

The
negotiating agenda also covers a range of “new issues” which were
among the most heavily negotiated subjects at Doha. Thus, it has been
agreed to establish multilateral frameworks of rules for competition
policy and foreign direct investment, with negotiations proper
beginning after the Fifth Ministerial Conference if the Members so
agree by explicit consensus. A multilateral framework could bring more
coherence to an area now dependent on a huge number of bilateral
investment treaties: moving from a system based mainly on bilateral
arrangements to one organized around a single multilateral framework
brings to mind the reasoning which lay behind the creation of the GATT
itself fifty years ago.

The
Declaration also provides for possible negotiations after the Fifth
Ministerial on transparency in government procurement and on trade
facilitation. The trade facilitation mandate addresses all of the
issues relevant to the movement of goods in international trade, and a
successful negotiation would go far to reduce the costs and delays
involved in doing international business. Many of these costs fall on
governments, and countries with small and over- stretched
administrations stand to benefit greatly from increased efficiency at
the ports.

Trade
and the environment was one of the most difficult issues at Doha. For
the European Union it was a high political priority to demonstrate
that the WTO is capable of addressing public concerns about the impact
of trade on sustainable development and the protection of the
environment, while for many developing countries the issue was seen as
a potential cover for protectionism. The commitment to negotiate on
the environment is focused on the relationship between existing WTO
rules and the trade obligations in Multilateral Environmental
Agreements, and on the reduction or elimination of tariff and
non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services. In its
continuing work programme the Committee on Trade and Environment is
directed to give particular attention to the effect of environmental
measures on market access, the relevant provisions of the TRIPS
Agreement and labelling requirements for environmental purposes. The
Committee will make recommendations to the Fifth Session on future
action, which may include negotiations on these subjects. If I am
allowed to state a personal view, I must say that I am pleased that
governments have been able to make a forward move in this area: they
cannot afford to let it be said that the WTO system is deaf to widely
shared public concerns, because trade liberalization also needs public
support; it has many enemies.

The
first major success of the conference was the completion of the
Ministerial Declaration on TRIPs and Public Health. This had been a
very difficult question, impossible to settle in Geneva, which raised
economic and humanitarian issues of the highest importance. A delicate
balance had to be struck between every Member government's right to
act to protect public health and confront health crises and the need
to avoid undermining the TRIPS Agreement, which could easily lead to
the drying up of the investment funds needed for research into the
drugs of the future. The job was well done, making it clear that there
are important elements of flexibility in the TRIPS Agreement which can
be used to respond to health emergencies. They include the right to
grant compulsory licenses and to determine the grounds upon which they
should be granted, and the right to establish national regimes for the
exhaustion of intellectual property rights. The declaration removed a
critical point of discord between developed and developing countries,
and it has been welcomed by governments, by public health lobbies and
by the pharmaceutical industry.

It
has been said by some anti-globalisation activists that the Doha
Agreements are a disaster for developing countries. This is a truly
spectacular misreading of what happened there. For some of these
critics, there is no conceivable text or process that would not be
represented as a conspiracy against developing countries and the poor,
but no unprejudiced reader of the Doha texts could fail to appreciate
the common theme that runs through almost every paragraph, which is
the fuller integration of developing countries into the trading
system. Provision is made in almost every area for capacity building
to help developed countries participate in and profit from the work.
Special and differential treatment provisions will be reviewed and
strengthened to make them more effective and operational. The
commitments made by Member governments at the Third UN Conference for
LDCs were for the first time translated into the WTO; this will
improve LDC access to foreign markets and accelerate the accession of
LDCs seeking to join the organization. More important, the separate
decision on concerns raised by developing countries about the
implementation of the Uruguay Round agreements means that nearly forty
of these problems have been satisfactorily resolved. Another fifty
have been transformed from unilateral requests into multilateral
commitments to negotiate and progress these issues.

As
I mentioned earlier, the accession of China and Chinese Taipei to the
WTO was a massive achievement. Indeed it was enough in itself to make
this conference a defining moment in the development of the trading
system. These two countries alone, accounted for half of world trade
which until now remained outside of WTO rules. Their integration into
the WTO is an event of major political and economic importance.

On
10 November in Doha, Minister Shi signed China's accession treaty, a
document of around 1,000 pages, the product of fifteen years of
complex and arduous negotiations. It brings one of the world's most
important trading nations into the rules-based multilateral trading
system. WTO membership will provide the 1.3 billion Chinese people
with secure, predictable and non-discriminatory access to the markets
of 142 trading partners. It will commit China to implement legal and
domestic policy reform. For other WTO Members, China's accession will
cement and accelerate the benefits of the dramatic liberalization
undertaken in China over the last 20 years. After implementing all its
commitments, China's average bound tariff level will decrease to 15%
for agricultural products. For industrial goods the tariff level will
go down to 8.9%. Some tariffs will be eliminated and others reduced.
Now that China has a seat at the table, the WTO has a more legitimate
claim to be a truly universal organization.

In
Chinese Taipei, tariffs, once implemented, will fall an average of
just over 4% for industrial goods and to an average of just under 13%
for agricultural items. Forecasts predict that a market for imports
equivalent to roughly US$1 billion could be created once Chinese
Taipei's concessions are fully implemented.

As
I stressed on many occasions before the Ministerial meeting, the cost
of failure at Doha would have been very high. Many governments would
have despaired of getting their concerns addressed in Geneva and would
have looked elsewhere. Regional trade agreements would have assumed
even greater importance, further marginalizing the poorest countries.
The current negotiations on agriculture and trade in services would
have run into the sand - destroying hope of bringing an end to the
wasteful and damaging abuse of agricultural export subsidies. The
concerns of developing countries about the implementation of existing
agreements, which have largely dominated the work of the WTO for the
past two years, would have been sidelined. Inequities in the system
— and they do exist — would have been set in stone. Happily that
possibility is now behind us. We can begin to look forward and focus
on tackling the many challenges that lie ahead.